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I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and ancient, or a hideous fanged creature deep in the sea where he’d see wonders even he could’ve never imagined.
We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.
He asked me to cry with him, but his sadness was his and I couldn’t steal it.
Was I expected to find solace in these people? I felt alone, perfectly alone. So alone I felt divine. Divine like a lonely god unfathomable to anybody but herself.
Wouldn’t that have been a groundbreaking discovery, someone bringing a creature to life solely with their own grief and a prodigious unwillingness to let go?
“Poop!” Magos screamed,
My mother thought I was a monster and didn’t love me because of it. This thing, an actual fucking monster, was loved.
“There’s nothing wrong with Monstrilio being wild,”
One thing about me i'll always sympathize with the monster
Monstrilio is wild. If you loved him, you wouldn’t want to change him.”
“Monstrilio is not Santiago,” I said. “You want to make him something he’s not.” “I know what Monstrilio is,” she said. “I made him.”
Sometimes I felt as if all the care he bestowed upon me was simply to keep himself from discovering what I hid.
“I didn’t think it deserved to die.”
I pretend my time as Monstrilio is hazy. Muffled sounds and blurred colors. I say I remember warmth. But I don’t say I miss my fur. I don’t say I’m hungry because my hunger is what makes everyone scared. They are happy to believe I forgot how they maimed me.
Coming up with words and then remembering what they mean is harder than the task merits.
